:186530 You're right, I don't have a stack of papers, but I'd be highly surprised if you couldn't find a volume of studies on the effects of abusive parents on child's behavioral development that are far less controversial than those concerning exposure to violent media.

People are much more willing to report on the amount of time they (or their children) spend watching TV than they are on the amount of time they spend abusing their partners (or children) in front of their children

@tzenes Don't be obtuse. You can't have a traditional double-blind trial with control experiment in sociological studies. You simply look at case studies and statistics of what is and try to draw conclusions. But you can't isolate one single variable like media exposure when you're looking at a national population. There are just far too many confounding variables which we simply do not understand.

Just because you can't do double blind studies like in medicine doesn't mean the entire field of sociology is incapable of producing scientific data. There are a number of other tools that can be used for statistical accuracy

If you were studying bacterial growth and all you could do was wander around until you found some bacteria, watch it for a while, and try to make claims about how the exposure to salt in the rocks affected growth... well your claims wouldn't be very good, would they?

Fair enough. I suppose I've exhausted my ability to try to persuade you. But my position remains that a sociological study attempting to draw conclusions about the affect on the entire span of our lives of one minor factor is fraught with imprecision and thus should all be taken with a grain of salt.